You can usually find Ryan DeRose, founder of the digital creative agency Vibethink, standing in front of one of the giant white boards in the company’s Downtown Mall office space, mapping ideas with a dry erase marker. The 27-year-old Western Albemarle High School graduate normally works 80-plus hours a week, all seven days. To say […]
Tango is the dance of passion: a gendered, structured improvisation of impossible closeness with fluid patternings that prioritize expression and intimacy, and the result of the collision of European and American cultures at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata. Maybe it’s no surprise then, that Gloria Rockhold, co-founder of the Charlottesville Tango Society, […]
It’s easy to think you know someone’s story when you see him every day. Working on the Downtown Mall, I play that trick on myself all the time. I see people going to and from work, watch the expressions on their faces change through the week, mark how they sneak away from the job to […]
Whoo whee. My wife delivered a healthy baby boy on Saturday. Talk about an experience that goes beyond where words can follow. You spend all that time waiting and preparing and in the final days before the birth, a hush comes over your life and then everything is distilled down to this one room. Life […]
Our country was born proud with a guilty conscience. Its patriotism flowed not from the blood, the land, or a shared ancestry, but instead from a common commitment to a set of abstract principles: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even as the words were written down, though, our government and […]
My wife and I moved to Charlottesville from the mountains west of Asheville, North Carolina, the narrow Tuckasegee River valley tucked between the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky mountain ranges that was the ancestral home of the Cherokee and one of the last strongholds of Appalachian culture. Apart from overflowing with natural beauty, it’s a […]
“We are a nation of laws and the jury has spoken,” President Obama said in his statement responding to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Indeed. The president’s message to the American public was no doubt delivered to tamp down any larger race-based responses (the hypothetical riots that haven’t yet materialized) to […]
A week back or so, I had an interesting exchange with a woman who had grown up here. She was adamant that somebody who came from the county couldn’t say he was “a Charlottesville native,” citing, among other things, the Commonwealth’s practice of separating cities from their counties jurisdictionally and the distinct identity separations between […]
My first job out of college was waiting tables at a French bistro near Columbia University in Upper Manhattan. The place was like the U.N. The owner was an Israeli, the head chef a Parisian-Algerian, the dishwasher a Mexican from Guerrero. The bartender was from Dublin, and we had waiters from Delhi, Walbrzych, and Tel […]
Power. Hah. It’s a construct. A misconception. A vision of the world with puppet strings. True power is in God’s hands, or it is the electric-water life force that runs through all things, as evident in the beating of the butterfly’s wings as in the groaning Grand Coulee Dam. Power cannot be a human depth chart. […]